


About Helen

by Wang Xi-feng (MadameLee)



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, The Iliad - Homer, Trojan War - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 7,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26369308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameLee/pseuds/Wang%20Xi-feng
Summary: This is a series of vignettes, each told from the point of view of a different female character in the Trojan War story. Some are sympathetic to Helen...others are not. Rated predominantly for language, warfare-related violence, and character death (usually referenced instead of depicted).This story was originally published on FFN in 2005 and I am uploading for completion and also kibbles.
Kudos: 15





	1. Perfect

To be honest, I didn't like her. She was very beautiful, and she had pretty manners, but I always felt that there was something off about her. Maybe it was because she was so continually perfect and unruffled; the other women who were parts of my life, and with whom I shared mine, were occasionally sick or tired or irritable. She never seemed to be. I never saw her with greasy hair or dirt under her fingernails; even at my husband's funeral, once we finally got his body back, she had cut just enough hair to fulfill her obligation, and torn her clothes just enough so that we wouldn't think she was indifferent. And even then, everyone said how ravishingly lovely she was. At a _funeral_ , mind you. 

It was one of the two worst days of my life. I was young, I was widowed, and I had a baby and no family close by. I was completely alone, and I was frightened. It was bad enough to lose my husband, and bad enough that his body was treated in such a horrible, impious way, but then, for me to be at his funeral and listen to that woman wail and cry and tell anyone who would listen how very, very close she and Hector had been and oh, she felt just like she had lost her big brother and best friend, and it was _all_ her fault...You would have thought _she_ was the widow.

_Of course_ Hector was good to her. That was the kind of man he was. That was why I loved him so much. He could never have turned his back on his kin, no matter how distant or undeserving, and she was Paris' wife, so to him she was kin. I've been told that there was a rumor, in the slaves' quarters at least, that she was more. Hector would never have done such a thing -- and if he were capable of it, I don't want to know about it. He is dead, and I hope she is too; if the story is true, let the truth die with them.

But I'll tell you this: when she started up, for one brief moment I envied Cassandra. I wished that I, too, had the god-madness. I would have given anything to take complete leave of all my senses and claw her eyes out, scratch her face -- even a simpler punishment, say a huge and obvious spot of oil on her best gown, would have given me pleasure. Oh, I tell you I would have given anything -- just to break the mask, tear up her perfection, see what was really underneath it all.

I sound so petty, but you shouldn't worry. I bottled it up and held it in, forced myself to be brave and to cry in private, and afterwards my brothers-in-law patted me on the shoulder and told me how well I was holding up. Perhaps, in those last days, we were all pretending; they were pretending that they could still win the war. I was pretending to be the model wife, the stalwart widow.

Dear, dear Helen. She never had to pretend to be something she wasn't. She was perfect, and we all knew it.


	2. Such Devoted Sisters

I told her not to do it. I told her that it was wrong, that it would be more trouble than it was truly worth, that it was impious, that there would be a public scene (I could not have known then _how_ public), that it was a phenomenally stupid idea and I had never heard anything worse, and that she had better not come crying to me if things went badly. I may be a hypocrite, but at least I have had the sense to carry on with a man whom I do not love. If all my plans should be set at naught, then at least I will not suffer when it is time to dispose of Aegisthus. He is a tool, just as an axe or a distaff is: nothing more, and nothing else. My sister, being beautiful, was fundamentally useless, and thus could not see that there was no _point_ in her involvement with Paris. 

Truly, she had no reason to do it. Menelaus is a wealthy man. He is powerful; even if something were to befall our familial connections, and he were to become estranged from my husband or from my parents, Sparta is well-placed and he has alliances. And he is not a _bad_ man, although he fancies himself a great joke teller; if my own experience is representative, I expect Helen wanted to kill him after the third ill-paced joke in one banquet. I doubt that he is capable of some of the things I have known his brother do. Anything Helen wanted, she could have; she had a beautiful, healthy daughter, and if she had ever had a thought in her head, she would not have had to look far for intellectual stimulation.

I told her all these things. I reminded her of the alliance that Dad had made everyone promise, and I reminded her that her indiscretion would make things difficult for _me._ Had we been serving-girls or chambermaids or the daughters of an artisan, I would not have cared, and I might even have given her a little to establish herself in her new life. I have been known to do as much for others; I have always been mindful of my station.

"We are the daughters of a king," I said, "and we cannot simply do whatever we like." In those days, I had high-minded ideals. They have had to fall by the wayside; I play for larger stakes now. "Agamemnon will suspect that I had something to do with this. The public eye is on both of us, Helen, and your behavior will reflect poorly, not only on you, but on your husband and daughter, and on Agamemnon and me, and on Mum and Dad." This may have been a grave error on my part; she had no sense of altruism.

I will not regale you with her sniveling about how deeply in love she was with Paris (whom she cannot have seen more than twice or thrice before) and simply couldn't bring herself to give him up. It was trite, and I told her as much; I told her, too, that she would simply _have_ to steel herself and do the right thing. If one must have a lover, then he ought to be expendable.

She was beautiful, as I have said. I suppose, having grown up with her, I have become somewhat insensitive to that; it has been a fact of life for as long as I can remember. Only as an adult did I realize that she was used to people making allowances for her because of it. In retrospect, I think she wanted me to give her _permission_ , and there was a marked coolness in her manner towards me before she left. Well, what on earth did she _think_ I was going to say, the silly bint?

She looked at me with her watery eyes and said, "Oh, Clytemnestra, you just don't _understand_."

Oh, I understood. I understood then, and I understand now. I understand more than she knows. Our behavior has been the same, although the rationale has been very different.

I, at least, stand to gain something.


	3. Mother Love

I'm sure I don't know why you're asking me about this. I was so young when she went away, after all, that I don't remember very much about her. Even when she was here, I was much closer to Daddy; I didn't get to see Mother very much. My nurse would bring me into her quarters before bedtime; I would tell her about my day and she would let me kiss her. I don't remember her ever being unkind to me, but we weren't close.

Aunt Clytie says she never wanted children at all. Daddy would say, "Oh, now, Clytemnestra, that's not true; we've been very happy since Hermione was born, haven't we, my dear?" and then Mother would laugh and say _Yes._ I'm so glad that when Daddy went to war, he didn't send me to Mycenae to stay with Aunt Clytie; she wrote and said she would take me, but Daddy sent back that my uncle would be going too, and she had three little children and I would only be a burden.

Not so _very_ much a burden! She would be my mother-in-law now, had she lived.

Daddy sent me instead to stay with my grandparents and my other aunt in the big palace at Sparta. Aunt Timandra was so much younger than Mother and Aunt Clytie; she can't have been out of her teens, I think. Of course I was nine or ten, so I thought she was perfectly _glamorous._ I loved watching her dress for dinner; she would let me take out the jewelry she wanted to wear, and sometimes she would put my hair up. As for my grandparents, I simply can't imagine better; they were as kind to me as if I were their own.

You must understand that the reason for Mother's going was never given out to me. I thought she had been sick well into my teens; I was shocked when I learnt the truth, of course. Daddy was the most wonderful man in the world, and I didn't know _what_ Mother could have been thinking. Understandably, I refused to believe it at first, since I'd had it from a slave, and they _will_ gossip, you know. The young ones are the worst; they live in the constant glow of everyone else's romance. Anyway, it upset me, and I was convinced that it wasn't true.

Well, Grammy put me straight right away. I must say, I was still a little upset; Mother and Daddy had always seemed the perfect couple to me, and when I was married to Neoptolemos, I wanted so badly to be like them. Of course, I'm not Mother, and Neoptolemos, I learned very quickly, was not Daddy -- not even his _own_ father, for that matter...

But that's neither here nor there. Anyway, I am convinced to this day that Paris must have drugged Mother or tricked her, because I simply cannot imagine her having left of her own free will. After all, she was a queen in her own right at Sparta, and she loved Daddy.

I don't know what went on at Troy -- Neoptolemos used to say that I couldn't imagine -- but I rather imagine they held her against her will. They must have. Poor Mother, captive in that huge citadel -- even if it was a gilded prison, it _was_ still a prison -- and unable even to send word to Daddy! They must have had her watched. I am sure _I_ would have had her watched, if I had been her jailer. She couldn't even smuggle a letter home to me; I'm sure she would have written, if only she could!

When I was nineteen and Mother and Daddy came home, it didn't matter anymore. Grandpa had died in the interim, but when the messenger came, Grammy said _Oh my goodness_ and we went out to meet them in the courtyard. I remember embracing and kissing them, and how I cried because I was so happy; I told Daddy that this was the happiest day of my life.

It's the strangest thing, but I've never forgotten how unhappy Mother looked.


	4. Something for Myself

You know, I can't honestly say I got on with any of my cousins. The boys were always out carousing and getting themselves into some kind of trouble--not that my father would have let me be alone with them, after the stunt they pulled with their cousins on the other side. Timandra and the other girls were so much younger that, before I was married, my only relationship to them was helping Aunt Leda change them and feed them. My father was half-brother to the king, and visits to Sparta were par for the course in the summertime.

I might have been able to like Clytemnestra. She was quick and clever, and rather practical, but very cold; she had very little compassion in her. We didn't get along. She seemed to always feel the need to prove that she was cleverer than me, and that irritated me, not so much because of the slight to my intelligence itself, but because I don't see such things as contests. So what if she and I were smart? That's a gift from some god.

Everyone who has seen Helen has remarked on how beautiful she was, and I won't say I was different. Women do not see beauty the same way men do; women want it and are intimidated by it in the same breath. They have a need to lessen it, or to say, _Well, she's beautiful, but that's all she is._ I've heard a great deal of unkind things said about Helen, and who knows--maybe some of them are true. We weren't close--we are still not close--and there is a great deal of her life that I haven't been privy to.

I was not, for instance, privy to all that went through her head one summer night, when half Achaia was gathered at my uncle's house. I saw her from a distance in that smoky, torchlit hall, safely chaperoned by her mother and sister, who was already married then. She was a small, frail figure, dressed in blue, and she moved through the hall, stopping to smile and flirt, having her hand kissed here and there. Everyone was taken with her; even my dinner companion, a clever man from Ithaca, was a little under her spell.

At Sparta a couple of years later, after we had both been married, she showed me around her quarters in the house my uncle had had built for her; I remember that she introduced me to a slave whose sole function was, apparently, to be her personal steward. A far cry from Ithaca, where my husband's nurse and I somehow managed to run the household between the two of us! I asked if the steward's upkeep didn't cost her very much--we were cousins and married women, such questions were normal. Helen blinked and said, "Oh, Menelaus doesn't like me to worry about those things."

He was always very kind and solicitous towards her in public. If there was anything else, I don't know about it. They had always seemed happy together, but in the last few years before Paris came, I had marked in her an increased dissatisfaction, a restlessness; it was subtle, nothing that couldn't be explained away by invoking her cycle or the lateness of the hour or the weather. When we were quite alone, I remarked on it.

Much to my surprise, Helen burst into tears; I recall my fumbling apology. "Good God, Helen, I'm sorry. I didn't know you were so--"

"Oh, Pen, you're so lucky," Helen said when she finally got herself under check again. She even cried beautifully--the tears now just barely moistened her lashes, making her eyes look huge and liquid, and there wasn't a blotch to be seen on her face. "You have things for yourself."

I said I didn't know what she meant. She went on, "People give you _space_ , Penelope. Even Odysseus doesn't stand around breathing down your neck all the time. Maybe Ithaca isn't Sparta, but it's _yours._ I feel so...so _caged_ here." I could only stare. I had never heard her say anything like this before; no god had told me that I never would again.

Later that summer, after we returned home, there was a huge storm, and the roof over the main hall finally gave in. It had been unstable even in Laertes' time, but this was its death knell. Thankfully, we seldom used the main hall, so in the interim before we could get someone to repair it, Eurycleia and I moved and emptied buckets full of rainwater.

Sweating, soaked to the skin, hair plastered to my face, I was carrying one out to empty it into the cistern when I thought of Helen, and I said a little prayer of thanksgiving.


	5. Façade

Even as a baby, she was beautiful. She smiled and giggled and flirted with people, and she was just the prettiest, blondest little thing you could imagine. She looked like what people think babies _ought_ to look like: rosy, chubby, dimpled. Her hair never darkened much as she got older; it turned into that nice honey color that the boys' did. And she was always sweet-natured, even as a little girl; it was impossible to be angry with her for long. I just couldn't stand to hear her cry.

Tyndareus didn't like that I didn't punish her. He said it was unfair, and that I was playing favorites and expecting _him_ to pick up the slack. Don't mistake me, I loved my husband, but really, I knew very well that he thrashed the boys, and that he used to belt Clytemnestra on the hand when she'd done something she shouldn't. Yes, I know that children don't learn any other way, but was it so wrong of me to want to spare Helen that?

We used to quarrel about it all the time. I was spoiling her because I allowed her to get away with things that I did not allow her sister to do. She was manipulating me because she knew that all she had to do was bat her eyelashes or whip up some tears. Well, of course she faked things from time to time. She was always a performer; she was so good at making people smile, or getting attention, that you could almost forget that she wasn't really book-smart, the way her sister and father were. Even the boys had enough learning to make them dangerous; Helen could never remember dates or names, her sewing always fell to pieces, and her spelling was abysmal. At the time, it just seemed cute.

For my part, I thought he was unkind to hurt her brothers and sister, and he needn't pretend I didn't know it happened. I'm sure the children knew we fought, and it bothered them.

Awful as this sounds, I was almost relieved when the boys started to get in trouble, because it meant we could focus on something else for a change. In fact, given that we were the parents of fractious twin boys, we focused on almost _nothing_ else while they were teenagers; I regret that now. Then, of course, Timandra was born, and after that there followed the awful flap with Theseus. The following spring, after the boys had brought her back and wreaked a nice amount of havoc in the process, I found myself pregnant again.

I was getting on in years, being then in my late thirties, and it was a difficult pregnancy. It was morning, and I was lying in bed, when I heard the familiar sounds of feet on the stairs; I was half-asleep, and it took me a while to realize that someone was fumbling at my door. Helen pranced in, and the sunlight flooded my room and turned her hair to spun gold.

"Mummy," she said quietly, sitting on my bed, "is it _very_ wrong of me to hit a slave?"

"If you did so without reason. It's one thing if she is disobedient or incompetent, but quite another if she is tired or sick or you are in a bad mood."

"Oh," she said, mulling this over. I knew that something was coming, and could only wait for it. "I...well, this morning, I slapped Aethra, and Clytie was angry with me."

"You must keep in mind that Aethra wasn't born to slavery, as old Doris or dear Kleito was. She was a princess once in Troezen, just as you are here at Sparta." I don't know if anyone had ever told Helen that, or if we had just assumed that she knew.

Helen wrinkled her nose. "Yes, but she's a slave now. She has to do what I say." She was so extraordinarily self-assured that the words died on my lips. It was the truth, but I saw something in her then, something remote that I could not touch, and did not think I liked. There was almost a sense, there, that the world and everything in it were put there to serve her: a god's sense of entitlement, without a god's sense of duty.

She was so beautiful that everyone used to say, in jest, that she was really the daughter of some god who had crept into my bed. I never quite knew whether to believe it, but didn't Father Zeus borrow the likeness of Amphitryon when he got Heracles on Alcmene? Couldn't he have done the same with me, if he wished?

But why, _why_ , did my daughter--our daughter--have all of the surface, and none of the substance?


	6. Silence

Truthfully, I never really blamed her for it. As you said, because she was the daughter of one king and the wife of another, and because the incident involved a foreign dignitary, her morality was a public affair. I am a priestess; I feel the same subtle pressure to be what I ought. It isn't an easy thing to live up to. Perhaps I feel it more acutely because I am a foreigner here. I have, too, the dissonance between my own religious conscience and the religious life of the people among whom I live.

\--Oh, we practice human sacrifice, too, in Hellas. No, no, I'm not going to lie to you about that. Why should I, when I was so nearly the sacrifice myself? The difference is that it is very routine for the Taurians, whereas in Hellas, it is not -- or is no longer -- a part of our normal religious life. I suspect that it is, or was, customary at the beginning of a war, a time which is not normal by any stretch of the imagination. I don't enjoy my duties, but I feel obliged, both to Tauris and to the goddess. At least I understand what the victims must feel; I can share that with them.

\--Yes, I'm sure my mother was horrified when she found out; she was at heart a civilized woman. I can't imagine that my father was devoid of feeling, either, but there was too much at stake. He had to go through with it.

\--But I was never told, you see. I really believed, in my naïveté, that my father wanted me at Aulis so that he could marry me to Achilles, and so that he could see me before he left. I was flattered, and a little bit frightened; I can't have been very old, only fifteen or sixteen. I'm certain that my mother knew--or learned, once we arrived--but we were only women, and we were away from home. If we had been in the Argolid, where my mother had powerful family, things might have been very different.

\--No. I didn't blame my aunt. Not for Aulis. I knew very well that she had gone, and I had some idea of why--of course it wasn't the whole truth, for I'd heard it from a slave. I do not remember any strong feelings towards her in my childhood; she was simply Aunt Helen, a bit like the ebony table in my mother's quarters, something that had always been there and that would continue to be there forever.

We did not go often to Sparta in those last few years, so I don't know what the atmosphere there was like. Helen was simply never discussed in our home after that; to hear my father talk, you wouldn't think that she had anything to do with the war at all. I'm sure it weighed on my mother; Helen's behavior cast a shadow on her.

There was, it seems to me now, a desperate impulse to pretend that anything painful was somehow not real, as though my father and uncle weren't headed for a world of pain that would be proven real enough. Troy might as well have been on the moon; it was almost as if my mother had never had a sister called Helen. The silence at Aulis was an extension of the silence at Mycenae; if someone had only _said_ something! I don't know if it would have been better, in the end, but it might have been more bearable in the short term.

In my own way, I am as culpable as my parents.

Someday, I will no longer be able to remain silent here.


	7. Honey

When we were much younger, we used to sit all afternoon in the great oaks that grew on Mount Ida. I remember how the light would filter down through the leaves and speckle our faces as green as my shift; his hair was as dark as his great liquid eyes, and mine was fair. He used to say it was the color of honey; then he would kiss me and say that I was sweet.

He was sweet, too. He was different then, before the goddesses came, before he went to Troy, before _she_ came. We were as artless as the bees I kept, not very far from my little cottage; we never thought of the future. I couldn't have conceived of one without him, and when I think of those days now, there is no distinction between them: they seem to be all one golden, idyllic expanse.

The first time he returned, after having been gone so long, I knew I had lost him. He'd already changed in Troy; he strutted, and he came with an army of servants--as though I were going to kill him! (Strange that they should think so.) His eyes were as dark and liquid as ever, but something was missing, and he looked at me, in my tangled hair and torn dress, almost disapprovingly. Once, a long time ago, his whole face lit up if he even caught a glimpse, out of the corner of his eye, of a girl who looked like me.

My heart sank. Helen had ruined him.

We said _hello Paris, hello Oenone._ I poured him a cup of pale yellow wine and set out a plate of honeycomb; Troy had taken his appetite, too. I don't remember much of our conversation; being a woman, and curious, I asked him what Helen looked like.

He paused; fingering a lock of my hair where it had come loose from its plait, he said, "A bit like you," and for a moment, it seemed that nothing had changed at all. Then he pulled away from me and said, "I had better be getting back, the sun is high, and Helen will be expecting me. There's a big party tonight--foreign dignitaries, Thracians mostly. _So_ boring; you're lucky to live here." Somewhere in my memory, I heard him say, _After we're married, I'll take you to Troy._

I wanted to believe that we could part friends. Failing that, I wanted to believe that I was the better person. And yet I could never quite escape the idea that I was embarrassing to the person he had become: that strange, strutting lordling. I hated him, and I hated Helen for making him that person, and for being so beautiful and well-bred that no one could possibly compare to her. "A bit like you," indeed. What a backhanded compliment!

When I saw him next, he lay on a litter. His forehead was clammy where I touched it, and my fingertips came away damp with sweat; he convulsed with pain, breath harsh and forced. It was late afternoon, in the summertime: the light was golden, and I could scarcely see without a hand to my eyes. They must have walked the better part of the day in the heat.

Whatever I felt for Paris, I did feel some pity for the poor wretches who had carried him home; I sent them into the cool of my cottage, where there were honeycomb and cool river water to mix with the wine. Outside, in the heat, Paris showed me his wound: it was an arrow wound on the arm, such as any soldier might take. Someone had pulled out the arrowhead in time, but I guessed, from his symptoms and apparent hysteria, that the arrow had been poisoned.

He kept saying, "Help me, help, help, help me, Oenone, help, fix it, make it better, you're the only one who can, please help me, I swear--" If I were cruel, I would have made him promise to get rid of Helen and issue a public apology. I was not cruel, though, and so I merely folded my arms and told him that there was nothing I could do for him. It was probably true; the poison had been given too much time to work.

Paris bawled, then--I had not thought grown men capable of such sounds. "Helen was right about you!" I must have gaped. "Bitch!" He screwed up his face, crying without tears as tetchy children do when denied some treat. " _Bitch!_ " The word echoed; Ida is a great place for sound.

"Helen is no judge of character," I snapped. "She ran off with _you,_ after all." At least I had had the best of him, before she came. I loved him first, and I had loved him best.

By sunset, he was gone. The last stray light glinted off his bronze armor, turning it to the color of honey.


	8. Knowing

There was blood that day, and the next day, and the next. I could not escape it for all the wealth in my father's storehouses. The bricks themselves, baked hard by the Dardanian sun and porous as a sponge, oozed blood.

Apollo was taunting me.

Even in the cool quiet of the temple, where I had gone in hopes of respite, I could smell blood--it almost turned my stomach. In the god's sanctuary, behind his statue, I tried not to retch. When I looked up, I saw the dark, viscous drops falling slowly from the trophies, and I thought I would choke from holding back my vomit.

I seldom went to my mother's quarters now--I am not like the other women. The god stands between us. Besides, _she_ was there, and I could not bear to look at her. Where others saw beauty, I saw only a grinning death's-head, or a ghastly, rotting face, crowned with fire. When she spoke, I heard the cries of buzzards and the keening of captive women. And always she reeked of blood and carrion. The worst of it was that she found me intriguing--perhaps Paris spoke of me as of a freak, or perhaps she did not understand that I wanted no part of her--and would go out of her way to talk to me. I would lace my fingers in front of my eyes, afraid to look at her, and kept my answers short.

No one could see what was plain as day to me, and this made me impatient. My father was first sympathetic, then embarrassed, and finally furious: he ordered me put away. What could I tell him but the truth: that I saw tiny, brittle chains of human bone binding her to all of us? I could not help the things that I saw.

The first clue I had was at the homecoming banquet for my brother and his new bride. I had known, of course, that it would be war--it could hardly mean anything else--but I had not expected to jump and flinch when Helen unveiled her face. Everyone gasped, of course, but we did not see with the same eyes.

No one, not even the god, had told me that I would see lacerated flesh, black with clotted blood and not quite dead.

I knew when Laodice knocked over her cup at dinner: the wine dripped onto my lap, becoming thicker and darker and taking on a horrible odor. I screamed, and Hector, who only ever wanted to help, made up a story that I had seen a mouse. For the rest of the evening, I could not bear to look at him; he had become hollow-eyed as a corpse, covered with dust and blood, and so pale and cold that I knew he was dead already.

Though no sacrifice could help our need, we continued to burn hecatombs. Helenus pinched my arm. "Just read the omens, Cass, and for the love of Zeus and Poseidon, don't say anything about corpses!" I know that Helenus is alive and well, for his form did not change, but when I looked at the assembly, I saw widow's weeds, and bodies emaciated with hunger, living skeletons.

I did not need to stand at the walls to watch the battle; it followed me waking and sleeping, and it never let me alone. Daily, though no answer came, I prayed that Apollo would kill me, or blind me, or free me--though I had little hope that the last would come to be. Instead, one morning, I went down to the river and saw my reflection in the water: I was covered in blood, and a great wound seemed to cleave me in half. The war would not end for another two or three years, but I knew then. Will it seem strange if I say that it was a relief?

After that, I could be calm. Andromache asked me once how I did it; I told her that I had foreknowledge of my own death, and she winced and jumped back, as if this made me unlucky. People would rather not hear the truth.

_Oh, Cassandra, must you be so morbid?_

_That is_ enough _, Cassandra. I don't want to hear any more, and I'm sure these gentlemen don't either.  
_

_And I don't want to know what horrible thing you saw your breakfast turn into this morning, Cass, because I'm trying to enjoy my lunch in peace._

We may have quarreled, but I am a servant of the god, and I owe it to him to speak the truth.  



	9. Tradition

At first, I was willing to love her like my own daughter. You must understand, I had thought Paris dead, and in the joy of being reunited with him, I did not take thought for anything besides lost time. I wanted him to know that exposing him was not our choice, that it was not what we had wanted; we had felt that the exigencies of state required it. Now, on the ship to Achaia, I know that this was my sin--Hector and Deiphobus were good enough never to say it, but I'm sure they resented me for all the attention I lavished on Paris. I know that Lykaon and Polites did; they said so with abandon.

My boys: gone forever, because of _her_.

She had pretty manner and a pretty face; it was easy to be charmed by her. Priam, much to my chagrin, was a little under her spell, even when he could not be bothered to spare a thought for his own daughters; Cassandra may have been mad, but it was obvious that she was suffering. He ordered her silenced or locked up, yet Helen he indulged. I was not jealous--it was obvious that there was nothing in it, that he saw her merely as another daughter--but she had so little beneath the surface.

Towards the end, we were being starved slowly, _by her husband,_ and she complained that the vegetables were not as crisp and fresh as when she came to Troy! I don't think that she meant anything by it, at least not anything malicious; it was mere thoughtlessness. By the time the last festival rolled around, she still seemed to have no awareness that anything had changed. We could hardly afford to do even the bare minimum for the goddess, _let alone_ set aside pretty things for _her_.

Theano was, as ever, tactful about it. I can't say the same for the other girls; Cassandra stewed and ranted, and unfortunately Andromache was going through an angry period after Hector's death. I remember that she drew herself up very straight and said, "Well, whatever _you_ are, you're _not_ a goddess!" Perhaps this was wrong of me, but I did feel awfully smug when Helen sputtered and tried feebly to explain that that wasn't what she'd meant.

Tyrian purple no longer even came _into_ Troy, for the love of all the gods!

At least we did right by Athena in that last year. I have always tried to be a pious woman, and I wouldn't have it said that I stinted any goddess. I had to break into my dowry money--some of it had remained untouched through all the years--to buy a few goods on the black market. We may have been at war, but I was not about to let tradition slide. It does count for something, and one could even argue that I had the greater obligation to uphold tradition on account of my station.

I'm afraid that in that last year, we simply didn't have room for Helen to walk in the procession that presented the robe to Athena. Andromache was a war widow, and Chryseis had been through so much in the Greek camp. Of course Helen was mourning Paris, too--he had just died. I had to keep a stiff upper lip about the whole thing, at least in public, and bowed out of the procession; in private, I suggested that she do the same. She hadn't been eating well--none of us had, but she had had no appetite--and it would have been embarrassing as well as unlucky if she'd fainted.

"After all," I said, "Theano and I have already filled the last couple of places. Surely Andromache and Chryseis deserve the honor."

And Helen had to concede that they did.


	10. Blame

Truthfully, I didn't know her. Well, not very well. I spoke a little Greek with her, just to keep in practice after the war was over. Neoptolemus wasn't interested in having me, and I can't say I was interested in having him, even had the choice been mine; he had all of his father's talent, and none of his father's personality.

She was always nice enough to me, although she was a little scandalized by my accent at first. The Greek I'd heard had been barracks talk, and Achilles was from a rural area. Apparently he spoke a very debased dialect, which I hadn't known; when she addressed me for the first time, I said, "Ayuh?" without thinking. I was informed that the word was _yes_ , not _ayuh_ — not unkindly, but firmly, as though I were a naughty child.

Not so long ago, she'd lived in the Troad; now that she was home, she was the queen, and I the conquered peon. (I learnt very quickly that it made no difference to most Greeks that I was not a Trojan.) If I had been an uninformed onlooker and watched her in her sitting room or her quarters, I might well have thought that she had never been away. Whether the war left any mark on her at all, I didn't know. I couldn't imagine that it wouldn't—even those of us who lived through it, on both sides, were changed forever by it.

Even in front of the girls who had been her maids in Troy, she never reminisced about Troy, and in time, I marked a coldness between them and her. She never discussed it, even when Menelaus wasn't around to hear. I never heard her say anything so simple as, _Do you remember…?_ It was almost as though, for her, it had been a dream or a distraction — as though, in short, it simply had not happened. Once, fumbling along, I asked her if she had ever seen the gardens at the palace; she blinked and looked confused, as though I had taken her for someone else, and then said, "Oh, yes," rather dismissively. Priam's gardens were famous as far afield as Scythia.

In the first years after the war, after we had all come to Hellas, we talked constantly, as though to try and find a place for this new experience. As the years passed and we became resigned to our fates, we talked less — but still, the very act of conversation reassured us that it had not all been a dream. She never seemed to need to talk, or want to talk; perhaps, while we were trying to hang on to our previous lives, to remember that they had been real, she was trying to expunge hers thoroughly.

At least, I thought this was the case until I ran into her, quite alone, one day. She had been crying; I remember feeling a pang of envy. Helen did not get blotchy or red-nosed as the rest of us did. She was startled — evidently she had thought she was quite alone. I made a clumsy apology and offered to leave; she said that I could stay, that she wanted to tell me something.

It was with great difficulty that she stammered, "Dear God, Briseis, I _do_ so wish that you'd all stop talking about Troy all the time! Do you think it's _easy_ for me? Do you think I _like_ being reminded of Paris? I _know_ the girls hate me for everything that happened there, and I suppose I deserve it, but it's hard enough to hate _myself_ for the whole thing without their adding to it!"

I stood there, stunned — I think I squeaked out something ridiculous to the effect that we were very sorry. After all, what could I have said to her?

I wasn't about to tell her that Laodike and Adeia thought she'd gotten too hoity-toity to be friendly with them anymore, that Eurydike had never forgiven her for the loss of her fiancé, that Astyoche thought she had no feelings for anyone else — in short, that her self-recrimination was no more than the truth.


	11. Forever

I have no kind thoughts for her, much less kind words. Call this vengeful if you like—I am quite past caring—but if I were to hear that she died in pain, I wouldn't waste the eye-water to cry for her. It was bad enough that my grandson married her brat, and that I had to see her at the festivities. We said _hello Thetis, hello Helen_ , but really, it was probably quite obvious that I wished she would just drop dead and have done with it.

…I _did_ contemplate summoning a tidal wave, but I rather like most of the other attendees, and besides, it would have embarrassed Neoptolemos in front of his in-laws.

I have drawn a fair amount of criticism for refusing to ameliorate my attitude towards Helen. Firstly, I am a goddess; I am not, I grant you, on the same level as the Dodekatheon, but all the same, I am divine. Before my marriage, I scarcely had to do with mortals, and now that my human family are dead or estranged, I have been withdrawing slowly from their society. What do the feelings of these silly, contrary, _transient_ creatures, always carrying on as though their intrigues were actually _important_ , matter to me? If anything, my good opinion should matter to _them_ ; I am willing enough to help them, if they need it, but there are some things I will not tolerate.

Oh, that my son had not been one of them.

When he was born, I knew already that I would never have other children. I would have made him immortal; when his father objected to this in the most vigorous terms, I settled for making him invulnerable. In this, too, I failed. I suppose, left to his own devices, he would have chosen mortality regardless: Patroclus was mortal. And in the end, having achieved nothing with my endless subterfuge and tricks born of desperation, I had to let him make that choice, as I had already known that I would…as I had already known that _he_ would. Achilles had already chosen his death when he had barely begun to live. Being what he was, he could hardly have done otherwise.

I understand, now, mortal women who say that one never gets past having to bury one's own children. At least they have the consolation of the grave. I can't help but suppress a smirk at the idea that Helen, too, must die. I'm surprised those Trojan slaves of hers haven't turned on her yet -- I've seen the way they look at her.

_She_ was rewarded by getting to return to Sparta and be a queen again, right where she had left off, just as though she had never left. If the faint stink of scandal clung to her, it only served to heighten her glamour still. I doubt that she has anything in the way of maternal feeling; any woman who can just abandon her child and go traipsing off to Asia hardly qualifies as a mother. So that she _could_ return safely, my son, my only child whom I loved with a passion that she could never have known, died in terrible pain from a poisoned arrow in the Troad. And he was not the only one.

Yes, it was a mortal war, and as such, it was a temporary and faintly ridiculous affair. Regardless, I am not the only one, even among the gods, to lose a child; Zeus' boy Sarpedon died in the war, and Eos has never spoken to me since Achilles cut Memnon down. Semi-divine though they might be, in the end, they were all too mortal: night descended on all their eyes alike. We must live forever; they are gone forever.

Forever is a mighty long time.


End file.
